AmateurRadio.com

A funny thing happened on the way down the hall to work today......I'm retired so I guess it was not my way to work but my wife Julie. She is a tech support person and is now working from home. She takes both phone calls and internet chat to solve issues. Earlier this week we set her up to work from home and her office is in the same room as my radio setup and her sewing hobby. So it's now a radio room/home office/ sewing room space.
What was going through my mind was how was the radio and Julies' new company PC and internet phone going to react to my Icom 7610? All was good and the only issue was her two monitors would wake up from sleep when I transmitted on certain bands (40m and 60m) I had this same issue with my PC and I added snap on toroids and it did the trick. So I did the same to Julies monitors and the problem was solved. We were operating both PC's from a wifi connection and Julie felt her PC was running a bit slow. It was no big deal for me to run a LAN cable from the modem to a gigabit ethernet network switch in our office. Julie was thrilled as was I too as both our connections were much faster. Now here is the catch.....I was on my PC today looking up some info regarding the upcoming weekend QSO parties. Julie was on a call and all of a sudden her call dropped and a type of busy signal was going off in her ear. I was not on my radio and only my PC. The day before I was on my PC while Julie was working away and without issue. When I shut my PC down her phone reset and all was good again. My way to deal with this is to think about what was different from yesterday and today when the issue happened. The only difference I could think of is we are off the wifi and on LAN connection. What this has to do with this new issue is beyond me but I left Julies PC on the LAN connection and I moved my PC back over to the wifi connection. After I did this and many tests all was ok.......I have no idea why both PC's being on LAN would cause this issue as with both being on wifi or one on wifi and one on LAN there was no issue. All that concerns me is that Juile's PC is working without issue and can get on my PC and my rig. My question is does anyone out there have any idea why I had the issue?

I went into the radio room last evening around 2130 UTC to have a listen as to what was going on. I found myself on 30m and noticed there was a few CW signal but really not all that much action. I spun the VFO down to the first signal at 10.110.0. It was EA6Y from Balearic Island located in the Mediterain Sea and on his QRZ page there are some amazing pictures of his surroundings. It was a very fast CW QSO with RST and TU (thank you) I then spotted him on DX Summit . He seemed to be calling CQ for some time before any takers. His CW signal was clean and crisp into Atlantic Canada and my 100 watts made it without issue.
I then moved onto the next CW signal on the waterfall of my Icom 7610 and 4O4T from Montenegro Lou's signal was very crip as well and once again my 100 watts had no issue making the trip to Montenegro. At 2200 UTC the band seemed to drop it's DX adventures and it was time to move on to things such as reading my many amateur radio periodicals a rewarding evening on the radio none the less.

Russian CW contest was Rockin the band

Another weekend passes and another QSO party in the bag! This past weekend it was the Virginia QSO Party. In this QSO party, you had to pay a bit closer attention to the contact information as it was not the standard 599 and county that was sent. In this contest, you had to listen for a QSO number and the county. In other QSO parties where the exchange is 599 or 5NN (cut numbers) and their county if you miss the county just listen to his next contact and you are golden. When QSO numbers are involved if you miss it or part of it and ask for "NR?" and they are lost in the mud.........well then it's a matter of counting his next contacts and listen to the number you can hear and then subtract from that number to figure out what your number is. Believe me, I have been there done that and it can be a challenge!
So how was the Virginia QSO Party you ask.........well on 20m things were really hopping but not with the QSO Party but the Russin CW contest. The band was packed with DX and very tempting to just jump in BUT I wanted to keep up with my goal of working all the QSO parties this year, I jumped up to 40m and worked a few Virginia station ground wave from my location. I was able to get 4 in the logbook only on 40m as I did have some "to do" items that needed to be done around the house. I checked in again on Sunday and went back to 40m but the strange thing was on Sunday I could only hear the stations making contact with stations in Virginia?? Oh well, propagation can be a funny thing at times.
Other related radio adventures were I was able to work fellow blogger John AE5X from Texas. John was working POTA and activating location KFF-3054. I was not able to hear John at all on CW but it was great he grabbed his laptop for the trip as we made contact on FT8. On Sunday I checked out the POTA cluster to see what was up and I was able to contact KB3WAV and at the time I did not realize it until I went to the POTA website and found that Kerri is a top leader for POTA activations.
His stats are:
Activations       1266
Unique parks      446
Total contacts   4730 Now this is an old number I would believe after this past weekend activation.

I also noticed on Sunday 20m was dead again as the Russian Contest had ended but it goes to show propagation is alive and well.
If you are like me and trying to work all the QSO parties this year by taking part in ARRL's State QSO party challenge make sure your seatbelt on during the weekend of April 3-5. The QSO Parties for the weekend are Nebraska, Missouri, Florida, Mississippi, and Louisiana! 
Finally, on a lighter note, today is a milestone for me.........I'm 60 today! My car dealership sent me an email birthday wish bright and early this morning way before anyone would have been at work. Darn computers programs just don't sleep...:))

One site I have booked marked and is a link on my blog is Southgate Amateur News. I was browsing it this evening and came across but yet another change COVID 19 has brought about. This time it's contesting and to tell you the truth I was wondering when this was going to come about. The RSGG or the Radio Society of Great Britain to which I might mention I am a member of. It was released today by the Society that contest rules regarding Multi op entries will no longer be accepted with immediate effect. The post does say it is until June 2020 but I imagine this is a fluid date. Single op from a shared station will not be accepted unless certain criteria are met. This is all to practice social distancing to which I support. I have not yet heard if Canada (RAC)or the United States (ARRL) will follow and any of the Europian countries as well. Speaking of social distancing I was watching the news and it seems like Spring Break is underway, here in Canada a gaming company released 2 new games. The message was "you just have to come and get your hands on it" This had young people in very long lines go purchase the game. I just don't get it I'm not a fear monger but we have to stop COVID 19.
Here in New Brunswick a state of emergency has been instated all stores are closed excluding pharmacies, hardware stores, automotive gas stations and finally grocery stores. Things are getting interesting!
Keep well my fellow Hams.

At my location with the lot size, the best antenna for me is an Endfed. Now I am not at all complaining because just a short time ago I was in a condo using the MFJ 1788 loop antenna. My first Endfed antenna was the W1SFR 6m-40m. I will once again repeat myself saying this antenna is great I have kept mine for portable operations once the summer comes.  The top rating for this antenna is 100 watts and since I operate digital at power levels that could be beyond this antenna rating. I did not want to overdo it and lose this great antenna. I then purchased the DXextreme Endfed from DX antennas. Mine is the 33-foot version which is the shortest but is the right size for my lot. While using my W1SFR Endfed on FT8 I monitored it's results on PSK reporter and captured these results with pictures. I wanted to see if there were any noticeable differences in results between the two antennas.  The new antenna went up on February 28th and I have been monitoring PSK reporter and taking pictures of the new antenna results. The mode of operation has been FT8 and the power output for both antennas was 60 watts. The location for the new antenna was the same as the old and the old antenna was 35 feet long and the new antenna is 33 feet long. I was not really expecting any differences but I was surprised when I compared the results.

DXextreme 20m

What is going on?

Back in November 2017 I ordered and built the Funk Amateur FA-VA4 antenna analyzer kit. The kit was built and passed the smoke test without issue. I then went through the calibration process and it was successful (so I thought). I was not able to get the unit to work and I felt it was due to user error and tried to run the calibration again but without success. No matter what band I checked the SWR was off the scale. I even connected the device to a dummy load without success. I read and reread the manual and even checked out some YouTube videos and was just getting more frustrated so I was thinking of selling it to someone who knew how to operate the unit. As I watched more Youtube videos it seemed like a very straight forward unit to operate. Over the course of a year or more, I picked up the unit and tried to figure it out but just could not.

The issue

This past week I picked it up again and was looking it over but in so doing for some strange it occurred to me to open up the kit and look over my work. It's embarrassing to say but as I looked the board over I saw that the female BNC connector  I did not solder the BNC center pin to the PCB board!!! I soldered this pin, did a reset to the unit and then ran the calibration again BUT this time the calibration took a lot longer. Once it was done I connected it to my Endfed antenna and checked 15m this is a band that I know the SWR is decent. Low and behold the unit worked as it should way back in 2017!! I just can't believe that I overlooked the obvious to open the kit up and have a look around. I now get to discover this great unit that I built years ago.

All is well